Flickr user waveman216 hurt himself, and he tacitly blames the iPhone. He dropped his iPhone, and didn’t follow proper safety protocol while using the treadmill. Seriously, the guy was using a treadmill with no helmet, no elbow pads, no knee pads, no shoulder pads, no chest armor, no body cast, no anything. So he drops his iPhone, like he hasn’t seen all of the video of iPhones being dropped and nothing happens to the iPhone, stops running, falls down, hurts himself, and can’t get up. It’s been posted all over, but originally showed up at Consumerist. I guess it’s a slow news day everywhere.
Remember all those horrific injury stories we heard when the Nintendo Wii first began arriving in homes, with flying Wii remotes carving a path of devastation and injury to humans and their canine friends? Apparently iPhone is next product in line to join the proud pantheon of killer consumer devices.
Travis Gohr learned a valuable lesson while excercising - treadmills and iPhones don’t mix. He chronicles the sad sequences of events that led to his folly.
Or, how to kill yourself with an iPhone.
Step 1. Purchase an iPhone. I’d recommend the more valuable one as that will make you more willing to risk life for it.
Step 2. Gain access to a treadmill.
Step 3. Use said iPhone while using treadmill.
Step 4. When your iPhone magically slides off the stand, hits the treadmill and rockets off behind you, make SURE to follow it’s trajectory with your head, not just your eyes.
Step 5. If you’ve completed step 4 correctly you should now be facing sideways on the treadmill instead of forward. Your head should also be cranked completely around behind you. The position of your body will lead to you being completely off balance. Let the treadmill do the rest.
Step 6. Your feet should fly out from under you and if your head is still facing backwards you should land flat on your back on the treadmill. It will then proceed to rocket you backwards.
Step 7. This is of UTMOST importance. You will only stay airborne for a quick second and when you come down, the back of the treadmill will strike somewhere on your body. Make SURE it hits you DIRECTLY in the spine.
Step 8. You should now have a broken spine. If not, repeat. Or, you might just end up blogging about how you ended up with a wicked pressure burst on your back.
You know the old saying “When one door closes, another one opens”? Well in Apple’s case the reverse sometimes proves to be true. Take for example the recently release iPhone update which, among other things, supposedly includes several bug fixes. Unfortunately it also introduces a few bugs as well, or at least that is the case with Mail.
Since installing the update Mail performs with all the vigor and reliability of a US Postal carrier, which is to say not much. I can’t go one hour without Mail locking up on me or crapping out in some fashion. In a typical scenario, I tap on the Mail icon > go to one of my IMAP accounts > navigate to the inbox > wait for it to check for new mail > while it’s doing that I often go on to another application as I wait (what can I say, EDGE is slow). When I go back into Mail I am greeted with a completely black screen, save for the toolbar at the top which displays the AT&T logo, time, battery meter, etc.
That’s it! Nothing.
If I stay at that screen long enough I am eventually deposited back to the home screen as Mail finally takes its death dive. Often I cannot even get back to the home screen because Mail is apparently hogging all available process resources as it chugs and gurgles its last breath. In cases where Mail doesn’t succumb to fatal injury, I experience complete idle behavior.
If I tap on the account sync icon, asking Mail to check for and retrieve new email…nothing happens. No attempt is even made to connect with the mail server - even when a strong EDGE or WiFi connection is available. It just stays there displaying my old read email, while new (unread) email is in fact sitting on the server ready for retrieval.
At first this issue was simply annoying. Now it’s becoming a hindrance. I use my iPhone to conduct business. Email is mission critical for me.
So Apple, if you could offer a fix for these issues, now would be a good time to resolve them.
What do you think they’re saying or playing on the iPhone?
“Beastie Boys… hm, no… Beyonce, Black Eyed Peas, Bloc Party, I dunno, what do you want to listen to? Beyonce okay?”
“You can’t trust Sid Hartman for Twins baseball analysis. Only Aaron Gleeman.”
I’d love to see what folks come up with on this one.
This story is so disturbing it simply MUST be true. A reader sent me his personal story of what lengths (excuse the pun) he went through to get an 8GB iPhone. There are many things I would do for an insanely great Apple product…this is not among them.
Nuts and bolts (okay just nuts) of getting an iPhone…
I openly admit to being an Apple Fanboy to the extreme. In fact, my wife had me agree to an annual budget for all of my electronic purchases…then came the iPhone announcement in January. I was smitten. Problem: my budget is already spent, my Sprint contract was in force through December. My loving wife agreed to let me get the iPhone (and not have the cost deducted from my “toy” budget) if I would wait until the Sprint contract expired.
The iPhone goes on sale…..
On a road trip with my kids (wife was at home with baby) I arrived at 10:50 pm in Boise. Next door (okay I had to drive around a bit) to the hotel was an AT&T store. I went in to just take a peek at the Jesus Phone…needless to say, I left the store with a brand new 4GB iPhone. I callled my wife with good news and bad news. Good: We arrived in Boise safely. Bad: I bought an iPhone.
The very next morning I returned the iPhone. I was angry, depressed, insulted…you get the point. My wife joined me in Denver the next day…but I was reluctant to even speak with her (you know, pouting). Noticing my sadness (obsession) she inquired “How badly do you want the phone?”. I let her know that I wanted it very, very badly. She asked me if I’d be willing to finally make that appointment for a vasectomy?
I absolutely love my new 8GB iPhone.
Maybe you’ve heard of ill-fated Microsoft iLoo. Well, someone took at Atech took that idea and ran with it, like they were afraid someone would take it away from them. Anyone want to make bets whether they made a profit on this one? Can we dream for a ‘works with iPhone’ sticker on this must-have accessory? [via camarochris]
Dave Stolte had a nasty surprise in store for him, upon returning from a trip to Eurorpe (with his iPhone) - a $3,000 bill from AT&T. It seems David learned the hard way that AT&T does not offer international roaming with its iPhone data plans.
Two weeks of travel with sporadic AT&T EDGE network usage off and on mixed with wifi when available… $3000. Doing some research, I learned this morning that AT&T offers unlimited international data usage at $70 per month to its Blackberry customers.
Here’s my bottom line: I want this same usage plan to be made available to iPhone customers and to be applied retroactively to my account.
USA Today posted tiny snippets of an interview with Steve Wozniak, shown above playing Segway Polo. Apparently, the iPhone was the theme of the brief interview. The view from the clouds is that Woz loves the iPhone, but he’s still using his RAZR for voice, though he vastly prefers the iPhone to other smartphones. He’s got a wish list of things he wants to see in the iPhone, and he intends to give his wish list to Jobs. Here’s a short rundown:
So now we’ll have to waste half a day bringing him in and hearing all his big ideas and letting him draw on a white board and give orders to some cafeteria workers that we dress up as engineers.
It was bound to happen eventually. Now the long lines of techno fetishists waiting in front of Apple Stores to buy a phone have been replaced by lines of creepy 40 year olds dressed as wizards, standing in front of bookstores to buy a children’s book.
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
